Petrarch 2: Petrarcher

Abstract

Petrarch 2 is the fourth generation of a series of Event-Data coders stemming from research by Phillip Schrodt. Each iteration has brought new functionality and usability, and this is no exception. Petrarch 2 takes much of the power of the original Petrarch's dictionaries and redirects it into a faster and smarter core logic. Earlier iterations handled sentences largely as a list of words, incorporating some syntactic information here and there. Petrarch 2 now views the sentence entirely on the syntactic level. It receives the syntactic parse of a sentence from the Stanford CoreNLP software, and stores this data as a tree structure of linked nodes, where each node is a Phrase object. Prepositional, noun, and verb phrases each have their own version of this Phrase class, which deals with the logic particular to those kinds of phrases. Since this is an event coder, the core of the logic focuses around the verbs: who is acting, who is being acted on, and what is happening. The theory behind this new structure and its logic is founded in Generative Grammar, Information Theory, and Lambda-Calculus Semantics.